Rijndael has shown
the Cryptographic community that today's Computing Power is insufficient to crack it. So be safe in the knowledge that Rijndael as it is incorporated in Away RJN Cryptography will give you maximum security at least for the rest of your life.

You might ask why our method of encrypting has been
published. Wouldn't that be a breach of security?
It is well known in the field of Cryptography that the worst way to prevent
someone from "breaking" an Encryption algorithm is to try to keep the method
secret. The absolute best Encryption algorithms are published and subject to
the open scrutiny of professional Cryptographers, Mathematicians and
Agencies. Once the algorithm and its associated methods have passed this
incredibly thorough scrutiny can it be deemed to be secure.
Beware of any products that make exorbitant claims about huge bit rates,
that say their system is Proprietary and that they are unbreakable! These
are amateur attempts at Encryption. Away RJN Cryptography uses the
professionally designed and tested Rijndael algorithm.

When It Started

On January 2, 1997, the American National Institute for Standardization and
Technology (NIST) invited cryptographers from all over the world to develop
candidates for a new standard for the protection of sensitive information
stored on computers.
Twenty-one teams of cryptographers from 11 countries submitted candidates.
These included several major companies like IBM, the information security
company RSA Security, Deutsche Telekom and the Japanese NTT. The candidate
algorithms were evaluated for more than 2 years with respect to security,
performance, and suitability for different applications.
Some candidates were discarded because they did not reach the required
security level. Others put too heavy a burden on the processor, making the
applications too slow. Five finalists were selected for the final evaluation
round: MARS, designed by IBM; RC6, designed by RSA Security; Twofish,
designed by the US company Counterpane, which we used in AWAY32 Deluxe and
Away IDS Deluxe; Serpent, designed by three scientists from the UK, Denmark
and Israel; and Rijndael, designed by two Flemish researchers.
On October 2, 2000, the winner was announced: the algorithm Rijndael,
developed by Dr. Joan Daemen, employed at Protonworld International, and Dr.
Vincent Rijmen, postdoctoral researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research
- Flanders (Belgium), employed at the COSIC lab of the department of
Electrical Engineering - ESAT of the K.U.Leuven.
The strong points of Rijndael are a simple and elegant design, efficient and
fast on modern processors, but also compact in hardware and on smart cards.
These features make Rijndael suitable for a broad range of applications.
In February, 2001 Rijndael was officially published as the `AES' (Advanced
Encryption Standard). It will be used to protect sensitive electronic
information of the US government. It is very likely to become a worldwide de
facto standard in numerous applications such as Internet security, bank
cards and ATMs.

The Technical Stuff

We are using it as a symmetric block cipher that processes data blocks of
256 bits (32 bytes) and using a cipher key of 256 bits (32 bytes). Further,
the data blocks are called "Nonce", which means a number used once. They are
encrypted and then combined with 32 bytes of the actual document being
encrypted. The Nonce is then changed, encrypted and then combined with the
next 32 bytes of the original document or picture. This method is called
"Counter" (CTR). It eliminates repeat segments that could lead to some clue
of the original document's content. See How Encryption Works for an
illustration.